What suffering reveals

In the last week of reading Calm My Anxious Heart, we're covering our If Onlys and Whys. I think we come to these questions when we are dissatisfied with our current lives. It can be a mild dissatisfaction that gnaws away at our contentment or a deep festering pain--physical, mental, social or all of the above. So I'd actually like to use this last post reflecting on Calm My Anxious Heart to kick off a new series reading through an essay on suffering ("Formed through suffering" by Peggy Reynoso in The Kingdom Life).

I tend to not like to think about God and suffering because I end up questioning the justice and power of God. Like many people, I wonder how could a good, powerful God be loving and not end suffering?

Now a very common response from Christians is that God can bring good out of suffering (Romans 8:28). Reynoso starts her essay confronting this by saying, "...the misfortunes, illnesses, deprivation, and cruelty that cause our pain are still intrinsically bad, despite how God may use them for good." We must start there. The death, destruction, and despair that can feel too near are bad, it's ok to hate that stuff, to stop in the darkness and say it's dark.

Our church small group has been making its way through the New City Catechism and we've been stuck in a long series of questions about God's law, sin and the effects of sin. Frankly, it's depressing. Week after week, we're confronted with our limitations, our sinfulness, and the consequence of sin--death. I want to throw up may hands and say, "I GET IT! We suck, we suck, we suck and we earn suckitude (Romans 5:8)."

But do I get it? I want beauty and sunshine, I'd rather gloss over sin. It can't be that bad.

But Reynoso writes, "We err when we look to suffering to reveal whether God is just or unjust because what it best exposes is the destructive nature of sin." 

In my first encounter with depression, I lived in a lot of If Onlys and Whys. I played those tapes over and over in my mind. I would curl on the floor of my room in storms of inner pain while I clung to ugly conclusions based on lies. And I remember at some point feeling like God was saying, "You have an opportunity here. You can keep doing things your way or you can try my way. Your way is leaving you on the floor in darkness and pain." Well, I couldn't deny that. In the end, part of the way out was medication, but a bigger part was choosing God's truth over my lies. Sin is wildly destructive.

If you're fixing water damage in your house, you need to know how far the problem goes. It doesn't do any good to slap a new coat of paint over the rot because the rot's still there. Before we apply the grace of Jesus to sin, we've got to know how far the rot's gone. So we read the news, talk to a friend, visit a family member in the hospital. Suffering reveals the rot of sin to be pervasive, unavoidable, undeniable despite out best attempts. Stew on that a bit.